It occurred to me that the novelization of ‘Shada’ might be something that readers here would be interested in, if they knew about it, and that it might also be something that readers here might not know about. So this is both a review, and an explanation of what exactly ‘Shada’ was, and how there came to be a novelization of it by Gareth Roberts from Douglas Adams’ original script.

In addition to being tremendously famous for his ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ series, Douglas Adams also spent a bit of time as a writer and script editor for Doctor Who. This was just before ‘Guide’ hit it big, when he was mainly known for contributing a few bits to the final series of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. (The one without John Cleese.) His big breaks came in a sudden burst, which is why he wasn’t on Doctor Who for very long. But he did do three scripts–the modestly successful “Pirate Planet”, the incredibly well-regarded “City of Death”, and “Shada”…which never actually completed filming due to a strike at the BBC, and which wasn’t remounted for the ensuing season because incoming producer John Nathan-Turner had no interest in doing anything his predecessor Graham Williams thought was a good idea.

“Shada”, in other words, is that rare beast – an unproduced screenplay by a now-deceased legend of science fiction at the absolute height of his skill, which can’t be filmed at this point due to a simply insurmountable number of practical hurdles. But this is where a peculiar tradition of Doctor Who comes in, a legacy of one of the few sci-fi/fantasy series out there to predate video recording in any of its media. Virtually every single episode of the classic series of Doctor Who was adapted as a novel, in order to allow fans to experience episodes that had been broadcast before their time and which (due to the BBC’s policies at the time on repeats and the previously noted lack of home media) they would probably never have the chance to see again. These novels were occasionally done by the original author, but frequently they were adapted by other hands.

While he was alive, Douglas Adams’ stories were among the few that had not been adapted into novels; Adams preferred to adapt his own stories, and the company with the rights to the Doctor Who books simply couldn’t afford his page rate. (According to Adams, every time a new editor took over the line, they had the exact same conversation with him about the chances of adapting his books, and he politely gave them the exact same responses each time.) But tragically, Adams died far younger than anyone that brilliant has a right to, which meant that even the adaptations seemed like a longshot.

Enter Gareth Roberts. Those of you who are fans of the new series might recognize him as the screenwriter of “The Lodger” and “The Shakespeare Code”, among others, but he made his reputation on Doctor Who as an author of several pastiches of the Graham Williams era of the show. His novel ‘The English Way of Death’ (now sadly out of print) is considered to be one of the finest encapsulations of that period’s whimsy, effortless humor, and penchant for borderline fantasy, and he’s always been an outspoken fan of Williams and Adams. As such, when the rights issues were finally sorted out with the Adams estate, Roberts was the first choice to adapt Adams’ unfilmed script into a novel. (For the pedants in the crowd, yes I am aware that the script was also adapted for audio by Big Finish Productions with Paul McGann reprising Tom Baker’s part, and that there is an unofficial animated adaptation done by Ian Levine using Paul Jones as a Tom Baker impersonator. This is the first mass-market adaptation.)

(Yes, I’m also aware that the sequences that were shot were released on video and DVD, with Baker providing linking narration. That’s not a proper adaptation. Sheesh.)

So now that you know what the novelization of ‘Shada’ is, the question that undoubtedly follows is, “Is it actually any good?” And the answer is, “Yes. Not as good as you’d expect a lost Douglas Adams masterpiece to be, but it’s definitely a fun read.” Roberts doesn’t quite have Adams’ deft touch for comic prose, but singling him out for that is almost entirely unfair. He’s not trying to be Douglas Adams. He’s trying to write Gareth Roberts’ very good adaptation of a Douglas Adams story, and he succeeds magnificently at that. His opening line alone is one of the better starts to a novel that I’ve read lately: “At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways – with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, ‘Wait a second. That means there’s a situation vacant.'”

The plot is a fairly classic Doctor Who concept – a megalomaniac (in about as literal a sense as you can get this time) plans to take over the universe using forbidden Time Lord secrets that have been concealed at Cambridge, and the Doctor (accompanied by Time Lady Romana and robot dog K-9) have to stop him. But there are a number of clever twists and elegant misdirections between Cambridge and the lost Time Lord prison of Shada, and I really don’t want to give any of them away for the benefit of those of you who haven’t had the whole thing summarized multiple times in old Doctor Who episode guides. Suffice to say that this is a perfect example of doing something new and clever with an old idea, and the story hangs together very well.

The only issue I had with the book, and this may be my reaction as a long-time Doctor Who fan who had heard about this one for years as a “lost classic”, was that I couldn’t help spending my time wondering which bits were taken directly from Adams’ original script and which were added by Roberts with the benefit of thirty-odd years of hindsight. (The joke about “edible ball bearings”, for example, I’m reasonably sure belonged to Roberts.) I wound up wishing they’d also simply published the shooting script, so that I could see what had been done and when and by whom. It was a bit of a distraction, but one that a less obsessive person might not have to deal with.

On the whole, though, I thought it was a great story well-told, and I think that any fans of Douglas Adams will enjoy it. Pastiches of classic authors have a shaky track record, especially of Douglas Adams (I don’t think, for example, that I’ll ever recommend Eoin Colfer’s ‘And Another Thing…’) but this one stands out as a fun read in its own right.

Let’s start with the full disclosure: I know Lars Pearson, publisher of Mad Norwegian Press, well enough to be on a first-name basis with him at conventions. He has provided me with a few free books, some because I’ve helped him out with proofreading and some because he’s just a really nice guy. That said, I would still be telling you about how much I love the series of essay books he publishes even if none of that were true, because they’re really quite excellent on a number of levels. And apparently the Hugo voters agree with me, since one of them has already won a Hugo and there’s another nominated even as I write this (which is one reason I’m writing this now, because voting is still open for ‘Queers Dig Time Lords’ and it’s the best one yet. The other is I just saw him at a Doctor Who convention and I’m in the mood to talk about stuff that happened at the con.)

The essay series, which started with ‘Chicks Dig Time Lords’ and moved on to Whedon, comics, and has more in the works, is primarily intended as a space for people whose voice has traditionally been underrepresented in fandom to write about their experiences. The writing has been almost universally great, with some essays by excellent professional authors and new voices from within fandom, and it’s also been insightful. When you think you’ve seen it all, especially in a fandom like Doctor Who that’s now going into its fifty-first year and which had a period of about fifteen years with nothing to do but rewatch old episodes and talk about them to each other, there’s no substitute from getting a fresh perspective on the subject from someone whose life experience is different from your own. I’d never thought of relating the process of regeneration to transgender issues, but the metaphor was described so wonderfully in ‘Queers Dig Time Lords’ that I can’t see it any other way now. To me, it’s important to give these perspectives a voice, and I’m glad Mad Norwegian feels the same way, because opening oneself up to new perspectives helps you to appreciate other people as people. I always feel like I come away from these books with a tiny sliver of someone else’s viewpoint in my head, and it’s absolutely fascinating.

And they’re fun, too. Seanan McGuire (also known as Mira Grant, for those of you who’ve read her zombie novels) provides a hilarious piece in ‘Chicks Dig Time Lords’ describing her kid-self’s confusion about whether or not the Doctor was real–he was on PBS, after all, just like ‘Nova’ and ‘Wild America’. And Laura Mead gives an essay in ‘Chicks Unravel Time’ simply entitled “David Tennant’s Bum”. Because perspective is one thing, but nobody wants to be boring.

I’m really hoping that ‘Queers Dig Time Lords’ wins a Hugo, because I do think it’s better than ‘Chicks Dig Time Lords'; there are several essays that are genuinely moving, and I hope Hugo voters agree with me. But I also just think they’re worth reading, and I think that the people who read this site would like them.

It’s not often that someone matches all three descriptions, you should be proud in a weird way.

You writing a blog post about how GRRM is wrong about the race of the characters he created was one of the saddest and weirdest things someone could possibly do.

Besides the obvious fact that he described swarthy Southern Europeans in the book, he flat out confirmed this multiple times by saying he always imagined the Dornish as Southern European.

The fact that this reality bothers you so much is indicative of a deep sense of insecurity.

If you don’t like A song of ice and fire or the TV series because they are “too white” why don’t you create your own instead of trying to harass and guilt trip an author into creating affirmative action characters to please people like you?

If you have a problem with too many white people in a story and a universe created by a white person, why don’t you stop reading and stop watching?

White people will never complain about the “lack of diversity” in predominately African/Asian/Arab films, entertainment media and literature, because we are not pathetic losers with serious self esteem issues like you.

Also the funniest part, even if Dorne was the Middle East, or North Africa or even just modern day Turkey(and per the author, it isn’t) that guy from the Indian subcontinent who even by Indian standards is incredibly dark, would have no place representing those regions as he does not look like any of those people, whether Arab/Turk/Persian or even Israeli, that last image confirmed to me your racism and your delusion.

A few points, I think, need to be made here.

1.) I am white as all get out, so suggesting that that argument was made on the basis of insecurity about my own race is kinda fun to say the least.

3.) Naveen Andrews is not “incredibly dark” by Indian standards. If anything he’s relatively light-skinned as Indian folks go. And he’s not from “the Indian subcontinent,” he’s from friggin’ London, born and raised.

I could go on – including the fact that GRRM made his qualifications about the Dornish mostly after that blog post, in part to respond to suggestions like mine – but yeeeeeeeeeeah.

If you watch professional sports of any sort, you know that good players have a productivity curve. They come out young and limber but not really knowing what they’re doing, and then they learn their craft and how to exploit their natural talents to the fullest, and they hit their peak. And then Father Time steps in and they start aging, and they can’t run as fast or push as hard or go as long or heal as quickly, because now they’re in their thirties trying to hang with kids in their early twenties, and their skill may be even greater but their bodies betray them. This is a fact of sports.

However, great players, the ones with hall of fame careers – these are the ones who adapt. They recognize that their old style of play no longer allows them to flourish, and they work like hell to find a new game, refining the parts they can still do to a godlike level while discarding those areas where they are now substandard. Every athlete tries to do this; many fail. The great ones succeed – Michael Jordan revamped his game at least twice, for example (and some claim three times) to accomodate his diminishing physicality.

The reason I am discussing this is because writing, when you get down to it, is a lot like sports. Nobody talks about how, as writers (or most artists, really) get older, they tend to produce less great work. The good stuff in most writers’ careers comes in the middle section, and the stuff at the end is usually the province of the tolerable. The stuff fans enjoy but new readers don’t seek out.

And, to make all of this relevant to the post title, this is why Raising Steam is so wonderful. Over his last few books we’ve seen Terry Pratchett trying to be the Terry Pratchett of old, but since about Wintersmith we’ve seen the slow and deleterious effects of his early-onset Alzheimer’s creeping into the work. Still enjoyable books, for the most part, but not since Thud! has there been a Pratchett book that feels like height-of-his-powers Pterry and we all recognized that, and marked it as Mother Nature being a bitch, and sighed.

But in Raising Steam Pratchett has written a book that simply does not feel like his earlier works. It’s still identifiably a Discworld book and still identifiably Pratchett, but the entire style of the book is completely different. Where most Pratchett previously was driven by the power of his core narrative, this book is more a collection of diverse scenes. Still scenes all connected to a central narrative, of course, but the format feels far more epistolary than we are used to from him (and he has always been a writer who has enjoyed his fun little asides).

But the thing of it is: this is great writing. It is great writing unlike what we are used to from Pratchett, to be sure, but it is great writing nonetheless. Call it Pratchett 2.0 if you like, because it takes the meandering sensibility of his most recent books and puts it to use; a writer challenged by time turning his new problems into positives. It’s a deeply inspiring book on that level, and it’s not right to call it “one of his best” because it really does feel like a whole different writer while still being the same man – Terry Pratchett of Earth-2, or similar.

I wanted you to know that I recently read your statement regarding the proposed boycott of ‘Ender’s Game’, and I can understand where you’re coming from in your plea for tolerance. Believe me, I can understand what it’s like to worry that your livelihood will be affected by the intolerance of others. Many of my LGBT friends have had to face open discrimination in the workplace due to the kind of open hatred you personally fostered with your time and money…and in fact, continue to foster today, despite your belief that the whole issue is now “moot”. So I can deeply sympathize with your hope that “the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.”

To that end, I pledge that I will in fact show just as much tolerance of you as I expect to see you and others show towards people of different sexual preferences and identities (by the way, I assume that since the issue is now “moot”, you’ll be disbanding NOM? After all, no sense throwing good money after bad, right?) In that spirit, I pledge the following:

I will not seek to deprive you of your legal and constitutional rights.

I will not seek to have you declared mentally ill and institutionalized.

I will not seek to have normal, healthy sexual activities that you perform in private with consenting adults declared illegal, in order to “send a message” to you about their morality.

I will not seek to have you declared an unfit parent based on your sexual preference/inclination, nor will I suggest you act in a sexually predatory fashion towards prepubescent children who match your sexual preference.

I will not refuse to serve you at my place of business.

I will not advocate the overthrow of the United States government in order to install a puppet regime that discriminates against your sexual preference/inclination.

Because I agree with your request for tolerance, I freely and happily pledge to all these things. I think you’d no doubt agree that I am meeting you more than halfway, given your previous verbal and financial advocation on LGBT issues. Nonetheless, as you pointed out, your backwards and hateful rhetoric is rapidly receding into history’s rear view mirror, and you are rapidly becoming seen as nothing more than a bigoted old crank who nobody listens to anymore. In that light, I agree that it’s easy to be tolerant in victory. So let’s stand on this agreement and let bygones be bygones.

…oh, you may note that “paying good money to see your shitty-ass movie” isn’t included in the definition of ‘tolerance’. That wasn’t what you were asking me to do, was it? Drop me a line back and let me know!

I always feel like I should begin a review like this with a disclaimer, so full disclosure: I’ve been reading Paul Cornell’s books since he was transforming Doctor Who novels into something utterly beyond awesome with ‘Timewyrm: Revelation’. I’ve been on a few mailing lists he was on, and there’s a non-zero chance he might remember who I am. So I may have some bias here, is what I’m saying.

That said, ‘London Falling’ really is excellent.

It’s part of the “urban fantasy” subgenre that has become more and more popular over the last decade or so, specifically the sub-sub-genre that involves police getting involved with the supernatural. I’ve read and enjoyed other books in this field of interest (I also highly recommend Ben Aaronovitch’s Folly series. I also admit to bias there too, because ‘The Also People’ was freaking METAL.) This story involves a seemingly untouchable drug kingpin who gets arrested and dies in custody all in the same night. The attempts to investigate his death lead to several members of the crime squad gaining the Sight, able to see the secret London only visible to practitioners of magic.

Cornell makes an absolutely riveting choice in this book by making it clear very early on that Seeing the secret London has absolutely fuck-all to do with knowing what the hell any of it even means, let alone having any control over it or getting magical abilities from it. The book is absolutely suffocating in its intensity at times; the characters have no Wise Mentor, they have no Book of Thoth, they have been dropped into the deep end and it’s sink or swim. And oh by the way there’s a fucking whirlpool over there.

The characters each deal with the craziness in their own way; Costain, an undercover cop, has what can only be described as the most pragmatic religious conversion in human history, while Ross finally gains explanations for the impossible strangeness that’s tainted her entire life. (I’d go into more detail, but I’m avoiding spoilers as best as possible, because there really is a lot of good twisty stuff in here.) All of them share one important coping mechanism, though; they’re all coppers, and they all fall back on their police training. Cornell meticulously researched the novel, adding a layer of authenticity to the real-world aspects that helps sell the more fantastical elements.

The ending does come off as fishing for a sequel just a bit, but not so terribly much that I minded (although I suspect that if you didn’t like the book as much as I did, you might feel a bit more strongly about it.) On the whole, I have to say that I enjoyed this one and I’m looking forward to his next book.

A few weeks ago, I suggested the idea of a Geek Guide to Everything, a sort of A-Z of geek interests that a young and inexperienced fan of cult fiction could use to pick up information on the things they were likely to hear about from folks with similar interests. The idea was not fondly received, judging by the comments. Most people seemed to feel that it was a bit didactic; telling a new fan what they “should” be into instead of letting them discover things for themselves.

This sort of surprised me, because that’s exactly what I used “episode guide” books for. On subjects where I don’t really see myself as likely to get into a topic (like, for example, anime or the Stargate series) but don’t want to feel completely left out every time there’s a conversation that references the topic, I pick up a guide to it, read that, and at least gain a cursory knowledge of the situation. Sometimes, like with Buffy or Babylon 5, I wind up interested enough that I later get into the topic, but at least this way I’m not completely in the dark. To me, a “Guide to Everything” would just be an expansion of the basic concept.

But again, judging by the response, this isn’t how most people use these guides. So I thought I’d ask what most people do buy an episode guide for. Because they’re certainly popular; there are whole publishers out there who make their living doing pop culture non-fiction media guides. But if people don’t buy guides to things they’re unfamiliar with, what do they read them for? Is it to get another perspective on a show they already like? Is it simply to reminisce about their favorite series? I can understand both of those views; after all, I do think I’m on my tenth or eleventh guide to Doctor Who, and I may even be up into the teens. Then again, even in those cases I’m reading them to learn, because Doctor Who is one of those series that’s difficult and expensive and time-consuming to watch in its entirety and I am learning what happened in stories I haven’t had the chance to watch.

So the question is out to the blog-reading audience: Why do you read episode guides? What do you get out of them? (I don’t know that people who find episode guides pointless will get much out of these comments, really, but if you feel that you have something to contribute besides the basic fact that you find them pointless and you want your voice heard, feel free to chime in too. I promise next week you’ll have the chance to talk about comics or science fiction or zombie apocalypses or something.)

(Major spoilers in this post, obviously, for the whole Wheel of Time series, and for the fourteenth book specifically. You have been warned.)

So my copy of A Memory of Light arrived on Tuesday and I basically spent the last week reading it, and – as the post title indicates – it is great. Basically the reason for this is that is pulls off a full Return of the Jedi juggle – by which I mean in Jedi, Richard Marquand and Sean Barton (and okay, George Lucas) spend the last third of the movie cutting back and forth between three exciting action sequences – the battle on Endor between the Ewoks/Rebels and Stormtroopers, the battle above Endor between the Rebel Fleet and the Imperial Fleet, and the battle in the Death Star between Vader, Luke and the Emperor – and the film does this while also using those action sequences to build in its character beats, which is why Jedi is a satisfying end to the trilogy.1

The reason AMoL is so fun is that it does what Jedi does, except instead of cutting in between three action sequences, it cuts in between as many as twenty to thirty.

But that’s hardly the only reason. AMoL is the final payoff for a fourteen-book-long cycle. Now, granted, this is the point in the discussion where the haters will all pop up to brag about how they quit at book nine or book seven or whatever2 but all they are doing is belaboring a point. I don’t think there is anybody who is really willing to stand up and say that the middle of the series doesn’t drag on and get tedious, because oh my do they ever.3 But that is the point I am making here: AMoL actually manages to make up for all of that wasted time and flabby middle-third writing, because it is simply just that entertaining. Just about every sequence in the nook is payoff for some element of the series – of course given that we’re talking about fourteen books that shouldn’t be surprising because, well, that’s a lot of elements to pay off – and because of that every part of the book is filled with grade-A one hundred percent fuckyeah.

Every baddie gets their comeuppance, of course, but the body count for the good guys is extremely high, like Pelennor Fields-level high (or even moreso since, let’s be honest, most of the named people who died in the Pelennor Fields weren’t characters with a lot of speaking time – and some very major characters end up biting it). The baddies are very, very bad and the book sells, mostly successfully, the entire Last Battle as a giant game of wits between the two sides, with both of them getting major tactical successes. Demandred finally shows up in this book after all of us waiting for thirteen books to wait and see how he was going to live up to the hype, and while Rand is off fighting the Dark One, Demandred serves as the Final Boss for basically everybody else in the book as the general of Evil Army and holy shit does he ever justify all his buildup.

Anyway. I’m glad I didn’t wait for the remainder bins on this one, because the entire book is like one extended guitar solo with lasers and fireworks and Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy and then more lasers. Not that I was going to do so (as I have previously admitted), so I guess it is more appropriate to say “I’m glad I bought it immediately and it justified the purchase.”

Yes, even though the Ewoks suck and Empire is the better film, yes, we know… [↩]

Or of course the ever-popular “I knew it sucked from the beginning!” [↩]

Generally speaking, the general agreement among people who like the series but are willing to be honest is that books five and six are bulky but still entertaining, book seven is where it starts to drag, books eight and nine are the low point, book ten shows a few signs towards the end of poking out of the molasses, and book eleven is where the series kicks back into high gear as if to make up for lost time. [↩]

When I said that to my wife a bit ago, she looked at me and said, “I have no idea what you mean by that.” I’m kind of assuming you feel the same way, so I’ll explain.

A traditional ‘alternate universe’ story, which is something that just about every sci-fi/fantasy series gets to from time to time, is like pornography in that it’s really just the same thing each time with very little variation. Each AU storyline purports to focus on a single point of divergence that has sent history down a different path…but the differences are never so great as to preclude instant audience identification. (For example, in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise”, twenty years of war with the Klingon Empire hasn’t resulted in any advances in technology beyond the Galaxy class starship, the Enterprise hasn’t been destroyed and replaced by the E or F, and all of the bridge crew have not only survived but have wound up in the exact same command positions on the exact same ship. Likewise, Giles is still assigned to the Hellmouth and despite the subtext of many episodes involving the idea that what separates Buffy from other Slayers who’ve died young is her friendships and connections with the everyday world, the only sign that Buffy is any less skilled as a Slayer is the little scar on her lip.)

The “twists” to this reality are designed, like porn, to provide simple and visceral thrills. They are less intended as logical consequence of any particular point of divergence as they are to give the audience the specific excitement of breaking well-established narrative rules. The premature death of Charles Xavier, for example, doesn’t lead to the dystopia ruled by Apocalypse because Charles Xavier did anything in particular, it leads to the dystopia ruled by Apocalypse because it’s the only chance that Marvel has to show a world where the bad guys won and the heroes are a desperate resistance movement. In the much later “Here Comes Tomorrow” storyline, Beast isn’t a villain because it’s a logical extension of Scott’s retirement from the team; he’s a villain because showing a fan favorite hero as the villain is a staple of alternate universe stories. (Another common trope is best exemplified in the ‘Magik’ series, where the cute and winsome Shadowcat is shown, in the alternate dimension of Limbo, as being a hardened warrior. The series also shows charming and friendly Nightcrawler as a lecherous villain…basically, you can chalk up 95% of alternate universe stories to the combinations of “set in a dystopian reality”, “well-liked hero is a villain”, “infamous villain is a good guy”, and “comic relief/peril monkey character is a total bad-ass”.)

And, like pornography, alternative universe stories have their own version of the “money shot”. If you accept the idea that the breaking of series narrative conventions in an AU story is the sci-fi/fantasy series equivalent of the sex in porn (and roughly the same amount of time is devoted in AU stories to showing how different and unexpected the alternative timeline is as is devoted to the sex in a porn movie), then the natural “climax” is the ultimate breaking of narrative convention, the death of characters who normally are given a protected status by their role in the story. Buffy is always safe in the Buffyverse (and possibly the only person who is)…so therefore, she has to die at the end of ‘The Wish’. ‘Days of Future Past’ has to end with a bloodbath, because it’s the only time Chris Claremont can get away with incinerating Wolverine, Storm, Colossus and Magneto in a single issue.

Does this mean that alternate universe stories are without merit? No. Like porn, there are wide variations in quality. (‘Days of Future Past’ would be qualified as “erotica” in this analogy, for example.) But it is worth remembering that stories like these always start out with a huge advantage in fan’s affections because that’s really all they’re intended to do. They are stories made to give long-term followers of the series “fangasms”, no more and no less.

Although some have criticized the film’s choice to have white actors portray nonwhite characters in various eras (and, in fairness, nonwhite actors as white characters) as unnecessary given the lack of thematic links between the characters each actor portrays, that was never the point – instead, the point of using the same actors repeatedly, I think, is to provide a grounding sense of unity between the six timeframes the movie is set in, as the storytelling of the editing choices (and I think shifting from the book’s “nested” stories was necessary to make it work on film at all) is jarring as it is; in any case, I have said before I will take a dozen ambitious failures over one unambitious, repetitive “success,” and so this movie gets my support for if it is indeed a failure, it is only barely one, and I do not think I concede even that (and yes, this may be a run-on sentence, but it is a run-on movie, so there).

When Snuff came out last year and was discussed here, several commenters made the point that Pratchett’s writing doesn’t read quite as it used to read, which is true – perhaps he has evolved as a writer, perhaps something to do with his Alzheimer’s, perhaps the fact that he is dictating to his assistant rather than writing himself, or maybe it is a mix of some or all of these elements. (I tend to believe this last one.) The point being: his Discworld books do not “sound” as they used to, and for longtime fans this is problematic.

In any case, Dodger is, in some respects, a clever workaround of that issue, as it is basically a Discworld novel transplanted to a mostly-real-history setting. Dickensian London rather than Ankh-Morpork, Charles Dickens rather than William de Worde, Joseph Bazelgette rather than Leonard da Quirm, Robert Peel rather than Sam Vimes (this one is not too subtle at all, since Vimes is of course derived from Peel), Angela Burdett-Coutts rather than Vetinari. Where Pratchett indulges in fiction he pulls more from Dickens than from Discworld (appropriately, as his writing has, I think, drifted more Dickensian as he’s grown older): Dodger himself is of course an Artful Dodger-as-hero archetype (with more than a bit of a mix-in of Pip from Great Expectations), but Solomon Cohen is very clearly a riff on Fagin and Simplicity reminds me quite a bit of Agnes in David Copperfield, personality-wise. The only distinctly Discworldy thing in the book is the identity of the Outlander, and that reveal works splendidly.

But is it a good book? Mostly, yes. As said, it doesn’t read in the way that Pratchett wrote at his peak; instead it is more in his later, meandering style, but that style is matched to a perspective character (Dodger) who is a meandering sort of person in the “goodnatured but ethically bendy” sort of way. The result is a book where, truthfully, not a lot really happens – you can describe the narrative in a paragraph – but the journey is pleasant, and that makes the difference. Recommended.

So I’ve been busy the last week, not with work (well, I’m always busy with work-a-day work, but you know what I mean). I’ve been busy writing, because Harper Voyager announced this, and I’ve got a half-finished novel that’s at about the 60K word mark and if I bust ass I might be able to submit it by deadline and have it not be shitty.

I’m going to try and maintain the regular posting level for the next few weeks, but if things drop off, things drop off a bit. Sorry, guys. If it looks like I won’t make deadline I will ease off the throttle.

So this admittedly funny post is circulating around the internets, and while people are arguing whether or not Jimmy Carter is underrated (dude was Navy) or betting on whether Teddy Roosevelt or Andrew Jackson is the biggest ringer, the one thing they all mostly agree on is that Obama would get killed early on because he’s too nice.

People are underrating Obama because Obama wants to get along, and here is why:

There’s a great Star Trek novel – bear with me, people – by Julia Ecklar called The Kobayashi Maru, which is theoretically about how Kirk, Scotty, Chekov and Sulu all took that famous “built to fail” test, and it’s some of the best Trek writing I’ve ever read, up there with the Zar books by A.C. Crispin or Final Frontier by Diane Carey or How Much For Just The Planet? by the late, great John M. Ford. I know this sounds like total nerdbait, but I am genuinely serious when I say that the top tier of 80s Trek books are simply some of the greatest genre fiction ever written – there’s real genius there, writers who wanted to write Big Sci-Fi Adventure and realized that Trek books were their best option for doing so. If you haven’t read these books, you’re missing out.

So anyway, The Kobayashi Maru is basically four short stories written into a binding narrative. They’re all very good: Kirk recounts how he cheated on the test (and it’s even funnier than it was in the 2009 film, and that was pretty damn funny), Sulu’s story is a melancholy and beautiful meditation on loss and the harsh realities of becoming an adult, and Scotty more or less blows up the universe in his test, which is kind of classic.

But Chekov’s story is brilliant because it skips the Maru test completely and instead proceeds to a second test Starfleet cadets are made to fail, which is basically a giant version of Mafia/Werewolf where everybody is armed with stun lasers: there’s a “spy” whose instruction is to kill everybody else and they have to survive. Chekov and his fellow cadets basically all blow the shit out of one another with their stun lasers and in the process torpedo many a friendship, and at the end, when everybody is “dead,” along comes the instructor. Everybody assumes Chekov is going to win because he “killed” the most other people, and then the instructor drops the bombshell:

They all failed. Like everybody always fails this test, because everybody does what Chekov and his classmates did, because everybody always decides to kill everybody else and survive to “win.” Except, of course, for one person, who realized that the point of the exercise wasn’t “kill everybody else,” because Starfleet doesn’t work that way. What that student did was refuse to play the game: he created a “safe zone” where people could come and show that they could be trusted (by surrendering their weapons) and once you can trust some people, you can extend that trust to more people because you’ve got people to watch your back. The whole “only one survivor” thing is a con, plain and simple. And of course, that student who figured that out was James T. Kirk.

And that is why Obama would win. It’s not about getting along for the sake of getting along. It’s about being smart enough to know what game you’re playing in the first place. And when you’re dealing with “every President fights to the death with knives,” you’ve got to realize most of them are smart enough to know that doing so would probably get them killed, and most of them wouldn’t want to fight anyway. (Jackson and Nixon, yes, but not most of them.)

Obviously, Ayn Rand has been in the news a lot lately. Not because she’s done anything particularly newsworthy herself, of course, but because the new Republican pick for VP has frequently and publicly expressed his admiration of her before being told that loudly talking about how awesome a self-professed atheist is just doesn’t fly in a party that panders almost exclusively to fundamentalist Christians these days. So he made a public repudiation of his love of Ayn Rand’s thirty-year old corpse, while still of course admiring all of the bits of his philosophy that let him be a selfish prick. (Um, this is as good a time as any to mention that yes, this is going to be a post with Views. You may wish to skip it if you love Republicans, Objectivism, or being a selfish prick.)

And whenever Ayn Rand’s name comes up, I always think of Philip K. Dick. Not because the two of them were buddies or anything. I don’t even think they knew each other. Mainly because I read a very interesting book called ‘Counterfeit Worlds: Philip K. Dick On Film’, which covers a lot of his life and writing in the process of explaining why his films are so attractive to screenwriters. The section that talked about ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, the novel that eventually became the film ‘Blade Runner’, explained that its genesis came from Dick’s thoughts on World War II and the Holocaust. He genuinely believed that no real human being could do that kind of thing…that while the Nazis might have looked human and sounded human, some fundamental human quality was missing from them that allowed them to perpetuate the atrocities they did. He envisioned a test that would separate the real humans from the fake humans, a psychological evaluation that would separate out those who possessed empathy for others from those who didn’t. This eventually went on to become the Voight-Kampff test, which could sniff out androids mimicking humanity through their inability to care about others.

Which is an interesting idea for a novel, of course, but I never really felt like Dick took it far enough. In the first place, I think his original notion–that people who lack empathy and do terrible things to other people are somehow “not human”–is really more of a convenient dodge than anything else. As much as I might wish it otherwise, Ayn Rand is part of the same species as I am, and is my kith and kin, even though she would fail the Voight-Kampff test. (“You see a turtle by the side of the road, lying on its back.” “The turtle is a leech and a parasite. If it can’t turn itself over, I’m doing the world no favors by allowing it to continue surviving. It will only consume food that should go to better, fitter animals like me.”) She’s a woman who notoriously idolized a sociopathic serial killer, and whose philosophy can best be summed up as “Altruism doesn’t exist. Anyone practicing it is a sucker, and anyone benefiting from it is a leech.” (Which didn’t stop her from collecting Medicare, of course.) Paul Ryan has bought fully into the idea that selfishness is a virtue and kindness a vice, and he’s far from the only one. To pretend that these people are somehow inhuman is to avoid confronting the painful and ugly truth about humanity: Decency is a skill we learn, not a quality we inherit.

And the most complex part of all is that it’s not a skill we ever truly master…and Dick is the prime example. His story that started with the envisioning of a test for empathy is, at its heart, about how it’s morally acceptable to kill people who lack empathy because they’re not really people. They’re things, and you can do whatever you want to things without feeling bad. (Sure, they’re androids, not people. And the Klingons weren’t the Soviets.) Fundamentally, Dick is engaging in one of the most classic ways of avoiding one’s conscience and shutting down empathy, by “otherizing” the people you hate instead of understanding them, while claiming that his purge is a pro-empathy action. He deludes himself into thinking that a man can “retire” androids who look like people, talk like people, act like people all day every day for years…and it won’t cost him any of his soul.

‘Blade Runner’, the film made out of Dick’s novel, at least understands how false that is. Deckard in the film is a burnt-out wreck of a man because his empathy withered and died years ago, not because he’s secretly an android himself. The Voight-Kampff test separates out human beings with empathy from the androids…the androids that live a life of slavery from beginning to all-too-sudden end, exiled into space to do the jobs that humans won’t do. And when they try to escape? We kill them…excuse me. We “retire” them. Because if we call it “retiring” them, we don’t have to think about what we’re doing. We don’t have to understand their fear and pain and anger. In short, we don’t have to empathize with them because we passed the empathy test.

‘Blade Runner’ avoids that paradox for too much of its running length, which is why I would like to see someone else take a crack at it. It’s a drama about slavery where nobody ever suggests that slavery is a bad thing, which is a bit too bloodless for a movie with such an angry contradiction right at its very core. The only time we see even a hint of it is when Roy Batty rescues Deckard at the end, an act that gives the lie to the entire notion that androids are incapable of empathy and forces Deckard to confront the truth: He’s a mass murderer, and he never even thought about it. And given that he gets maybe two lines of dialogue after that, I’d call the film at least a little bit flawed. A sequel that really got into the idea, one that confronted the notions that androids could learn how to be human beings…and that human beings can all too easily forget…could be even better than its predecessor.